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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

A while back in PyCon UK I met some of the people behind http://www.openstenoproject.org/plover/

It’s awesome just how fast and accurate they can be, and most devs were of my mindset “wow can I learn to type like that - it woukd solve this problem and that”

Till we found out just how much work is needed to get good. It’s a true skill, and sadly undervalued but something that just has too little pro for the cons - in my opinion as a developer.

I already type at faster than I can code, and slightly slower than I can write English. A better keyboard, or the same keyboard at different workstations and laptops, or some typing tutorials woukd help me - but full on 100wpm is not going to help me debug Kerberos failures

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Steno will get you to 200+ wpm, not 100.

I've been trying to learn steno on and off for 5+ years. The problem is I already have 150 WPM on qwerty and I cannot think of a message on Teams faster than I currently type. The opportunity cost is far too large to justify unless you need to transcribe someone else's speech.

I top out around 100 wpm but still rarely bother to push myself to hit my max—and pretty much never when writing code.

I can’t really relate to “I need to type faster!” programmer optimizations, nor complaints about things like static typing slowing people down because it’s a few more characters (more thinking, I’d get, but some folks do seem bothered by the extra keystrokes) since input speed is nowhere near being my bottleneck when I’m writing code.

I suppose there must be people out there who simply think a ton faster than me, and of course some others are much slower typists than me, and for those folks that stuff’s a bigger deal.

I also see no need to type faster, but as I get older and have more and more RSI-type issues I'm starting to see more and more appeal into being able to type at the same speed with fewer keystrokes.

Always seemed to me like they'd be terrible for programming with all the punctuation though.

I also need a mouse way too much (and I have shakey hands so trackballs/nipple mice are not viable)

> I can’t really relate to “I need to type faster!” programmer optimizations, nor complaints about things like static typing slowing people down because it’s a few more characters...

One common loop in programming is "hypothesize, test, evaluate".

If you're exploring or playing around, the quicker you can execute iterations of this, the more likely it is you'll succeed in what you're trying to do.

In that case, stuff like "unused import is a compiler error" or "static typing required" slows down iteration, so gets in the way of rapid prototyping (or whatever).

"Typing quicker" wouldn't benefit the 'hypothesize' nor 'evaluate' parts, sure, but it'd help you reduce the time it takes to test an idea.

> stuff like "unused import is a compiler error"

For things like this I’d much rather spend the time to improve “quick fix” suggestions in my development environments. The computer can fix the problem much more easily than I can learn a new keyboard layout.

How'd you get to 150?

Honestly, lots of practice. I've been playing Roblox since 2008. Roblox has also always been text chat, so if I wanted to talk trash AND get kills, I had to be fast.

That + a physical inability to handwrite so I've typed virtually everything.

It's kind of useless. I almost never encounter a scenario outside of live transcription where I can conceptualize a character stream faster than my fingers can input the stream into a computer. The only programming scenario where that's an issue is LaTeX during a lecture because it's very verbose in places. I also do competitive debate which has a heavy focus on note-taking; high WPMs are useful there.

But neither of these two things will be important once I graduate university.

I was never trained as a touch-typist. I still have to look at the keyboard as I type, and have never become a master CLI maven.

But it hasn’t prevented me from writing thousands of pages of prose, and millions of lines of code.

I think it has probably also saved me from RSI. I have a friend that is a master engineer, that has to change their career, because their arms are all screwed up (multiple surgeries didn’t fix it).

If one can get RSI in the wrists as a touch typist, why couldn't one get RSI in the shoulders or elbows as a 'hunt and peck' typist?

Because we don't move in a repeatable fashion. I'm not in one position, all the time. My whole arm moves in fairly random fashion.

The RSI is not because of movement, per se, it's because of repetition of the same moves (Thus, the "R" in "RSI").

Trained touch-typists keep their back straight, their arms at the same level, and basically only move their hands and wrists; always alternating between the exact same positions. I suspect that "extra-clicky" keyboards, which require a bit of force to actuate, don't help.

It's highly efficient, and I have always been in awe of really good touch-typists. Most don't get RSI, and I'm not sure what the difference is, with the ones that do.

This is interesting. I haven't watched the whole talk so please ignore this if it's discussed there. The Steno keyboard looks like it takes into consideration that the language being typed is English (syllable split etc.) so if you're typing a programming language with variable names that have non english spellings, wouldn't it be a problem?

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